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The Baslow Register of Seats 1789

(or “Where did your Ancestors sit in Church?”)

Editor's Note: This most interesting account features
a little-known ‘seating plan’ preserved in the Baslow ‘Parish Chest’, and
illustrates the amount of family background which may be gained from its study.

“It amounts to something like a census of the male heads of households
who attended the church in 1789. In very fine copperplate handwriting it lists the
occupant of all 380 seats in the church.”

Fellow Marples researchers may wish to consult Rodney's
Marples Family History web site for
his study of Marple(s) families in Baslow
from 1565 to the present day worldwide.

It all started when I received an e-mail from Ellis
MARPLES of New Jersey, USA asking me to
help trace his ancestry. Although I have not
registered with the GOONS, for over 20 years I
have effectively been conducting a one name
study on the MARPLE(S) families, so I was
delighted to be able to help. It did not take us to
long to work out that he was descended from
Robert MARPLE & Jane GOODWIN of
Baslow. This was good news for my ancestral
village is Baslow and so it seemed that there
would be a good chance that Ellis & I were
related.

Robert & Jane married in Baslow on 19th June
1782, but the bad news was that, for years, I had
not been able to identify just who this Robert
MARPLE was. Robert was a very popular
Christian name in the MARPLES families
particularly in the 16th to 18th centuries; to the
extent that more than 90% of all Robert
MARPLES born in that time feature in my
family tree. To give you an idea of how popular
the name Robert was, there are no less than six
marriages in Baslow between 1757 and 1787
involving a Robert Marples! To make matters
worse, the six wives included 2 Elizabeths, 2
Marys and 2 Janes! Between 1665 and 1799, a
span of 134 years, there are 58 baptisms children
whose father is a Robert MARPLE. This rate of
baptism works out at an average of just over one
every two years and four months; with a
maximum gap between baptisms of six years.

Whilst I am fortunate that the Baslow registers
go back a long way (to around 1580 or so), they
aren't the most chatty, and supplementary
information is rare. So sorting out all the
baptisms where Robert was the father into their
respective families has proved something of a
nightmare. My own line has some of these
Roberts and I had quite a lot of difficulty with
one of them. The only way in which I could
make sense of the data was to assume that this
Robert married twice. Assuming that was one
thing, proving it quite another. For some years
my own line had stalled at this point and it
wasn't until I found a will in the Lichfield DRO
that I found the proof I needed.

However, this wasn't helping Ellis with Robert
MARPLE & Jane GOODWIN. Furthermore, I
had already trawled through the Lichfield DRO
for helpful wills and knew that there wasn't any
more to discover there.

When I started out to research my ancestry, the
spur was an obituary notice, dated 1931, for my
grandfather, Theophilus MARPLES. He was a
leading dog judge of his day and was the Editor
of the weekly newspaper “Our Dogs”. The
obituary covered a double page spread and was
mainly devoted to his career in dogs. However
the first two paragraphs covered something of
his ancestry; most of which, I'm sorry to say,
seemed to me to be the product of a vivid
imagination, rather than factual research (e.g. the
Marples family came over from Europe with the
Huguenots and gave our name to the village of
Marple on the Cheshire/Derbyshire border!).
The one bit of uncontentious ancestry was the
statement that Theophilus' grandfather was
William MARPLES, who had been sexton at St.
Anne's church, Baslow for 30 years. So off to
Baslow my wife and I went one sunny Saturday
morning nearly 30 years ago.

Seeing us poking about round the gravestones in
that delightful churchyard by the banks of the
River Derwent, we were accosted by the vicar,
Rev. Jack WALSER, a lovely man. We
introduced ourselves and explained what we
were doing. Before we knew quite what was
happening, Rev. WALSER had invited us into
the vestry and was busy showing us the Baslow
registers. To my delight MARPLES entries
abounded in them, but it soon became clear that,
because of the sheer volume of entries, an
organized approach to extracting the data was
going to be needed. In exchange for a suitable
donation to the church funds, Rev. WALSER
soon agreed to the suggestion that I should put
together a small family team and blitz the
registers. The next two weekends saw my wife
and I, together with my parents, Brian & Edna
MARPLES descend on the vestry armed with
forms I had drawn up.

The job done, I settled down at home to try and
make sense of it all. Whilst I was in the vestry I
took the opportunity to see what else the vestry
safe might have to offer; under Rev. Jack's
watchful eye of course! Churchwardens'
Accounts and Overseers' of the Poor Accounts
were noted and looked at.

But all that was, as I say, nearly 30 years ago,
when I knew nothing of family history research
or how to go about it, or what pitfalls and
mistakes might lie in wait for me.

Thinking about the problem of Robert & Jane, I
wondered, not for the first time, whether I had
missed a vital clue in the parish registers. Were
there any other documents now in the CRO at
Matlock that might shed some light on the
problem? Clearly another visit to Matlock had to
be planned and organized.

The difficulty with Robert & Jane was just one
of several puzzles with the Baslow data that still
remain unresolved. Working with the same set
of data for 30 years makes one very familiar
with it all. Why, for instance, did John
MARPLES of Unstone, who died in 1808,
decide to be buried in Baslow? Fellow DFHS
member, Eileen DORR (whose mother was a
MARPLES, descended from this John) and I
have puzzled over this for years. John married in
Chesterfield and seems to have spent all his
adult life in and around Apperknowle and
Unstone. So why be buried in Baslow? The only
answer, it seemed to us, was that he had been
born there and that's where his family came
from. To be sure, there was a baptism of a John
at about the right time, and about whom nothing
else was known. But how to prove the
connection?

Suitably installed in the CRO, I started checking
off my extracts against the microfilm copy. But
to no avail. The extracts were correct and there
was nothing of further use or interest to note. I
wondered what else the microfilm contained, so
I wound on to the end of the registers, past the
Churchwardens' Accounts, past the Overseers of
the Poor Accounts and then I struck pure gold!
Right at the end of the Baslow section was the
Register of Seats of 1789. As I looked at the
picture of the cover on the microfilm, I vaguely
remembered lifting this very slim volume, bound
in smooth maroon leather with title blocked in
gold, from the vestry safe. But nearly 30 years
ago what did I care who sat where in the church?
So after a brief glance inside it was onto other
far more interesting things. Oh the innocence of
youth!

Now I studied the little book with riveted
fascination. It amounts to something like a
census of the male heads of households who
attended the church in 1789. In very fine
copperplate handwriting it lists the occupant of
all 380 seats in the church. The list is arranged
by pew and sets out who occupied it, who owned
it, and by what right the occupant held it. By far
the biggest number of seats were owned by the
Duke of Rutland, and the occupants were
allocated their seats because of their tenure of
various properties in Baslow; about which very
little detail was given.

And there in
seat 5 of pew 41 was John
MARPLES of Unstone, who held it as heir at
law to Robert DOBB. Next to him was William
DOBB, successor to Robert DOBB. I was
already familiar with the name DOBB as it
cropped up in the will of Thomas MARPLE of
Cliff, who was buried in Baslow on 13th April
1756. In it Thomas referred to his “loving uncle
Robert DOBBE”. What's more, Thomas had a
brother, John. A bit more research at Lichfield,
and I found the will of John DOBB, Robert's
brother. That will referred to John & Thomas
MARPLE, sons of George MARPLE “and my
sister Margaret DOBB”. Thus was one puzzle
solved and Eileen's ancestry taken back 2 more
generations and another 200 or so cousins added
to her family tree.

Most of the Marples in the Register seemed to
have more than 1 seat, but always spread over
more than one pew. It must have been very odd
on Sundays to attend the services with one's
family scattered all over the place. In this day
and age, it must also seem odd that parishioners
had rights over particular seats in the church; but
my mother remembers being taken as a young
girl to church by her mother. They were required
to wait at the back of the church until the great
and the good were seated, before the vergers
would show my mother and grandmother to
vacant seats.

But what of Robert & Jane? The Register of
Seats didn't shed that much light, but enough.
There was Robert MARPLES of Cock Hill
(where the Peacock Hotel is situated today). He
had 5 seats in pews 1, 5, 10, & 77. Then there
was Robert MARPLES of Gate Row (a Baslow
district I have not been able to identify). He also
had 5 seats in pews 5, 52, 65 & 77. Then there
was plain Robert MARPLES who had 1 seat in
pew 79, by virtue of a tenancy in Gate Row.
This one looked like my man.

Armed with this information, and using the
Sherlock Holmes' axiom that “once you have
eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth.” I
eventually established that Ellis and I were 6th
cousins. What a gem the Register of Seats turned
out to be. So if you are stuck with your
researches see what else the CRO has to offer on
your ancestral parish. You may well get a very
pleasant surprise!